The Loch Ness Monster, and How We Breathe KRYSTAL YANG
I know one truth. That is, I believe one thing: my father left us the day I was born. My mother told me that she was forced to drive herself to the hospital, because he had folded his face between her legs and refused to come out, stuck in some wild, hormonal hibernation until the doctors anaesthetized him along with my mother. And when she opened her eyes after the C-section, he was gone. My mother refused to tell me why he left. The answer must have been like a family heirloom, a piece of buried treasure bulging from her heart like the cancer that metastasized in her chest when she turned sixty. Good fortune, she liked to tell me, didn’t run in our blood. (I do not think I believe her.) In my dreams, he was always searching for her. He was a shadow stooped low over the horizon, as real as a plastic submarine, and she was the ghost of a conch shell, echoing from the ambient noise when you cocked your ear against her stomach. My father and I, we would close our eyes and hold our breaths, and listen to how her insides resonated at a slower and deeper frequency, like the groaning of her voice when she hummed along to the car radio. We would wrap ourselves around her waist, letting the vibrations push through us, and I would wake up with a raging fever and my eyes burning from sleep. *** My mother and I visited him every summer at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. The one with the big spinning mushroom ride and the colorful arcade with pink jawbreakers and expired glow-inthe-dark bubblegum hanging like plastic corpses from the entrance. We would blow ten dollars on the dumb claw machine games before making our way down to the pier. I would try to walk across the sand in a straight line, leaving a trail of grimy footprints as bait to be devoured by the water or the fish or whatever things lived underwater. I liked to waddle in after my mother, my hands balled into empty fists and tucked into the crevices on either side of my nose to form a pair of fleshy binoculars. We would trudge deeper and deeper until the back and forth of the tide made us dizzy, but we were desperate and the ocean was always opaque with nothing. 52 • Spring 2020
